Rajoy’s strategy has been to remain in the background./ Photo: Pool Moncloa/Diego Crespo
Cristina de la Hoz. 25/01/2016
Acting Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, is buying time while waiting for the PSOE to stop Pedro Sanchez objective: reaching an agreement with Podemos. Rajoy has held talks with the old socialist guard while Sánchez talks to Albert Rivera and Pablo Iglesias but postpones the negotiations to form a leftist government and rejects the “blackmail” of Podemos.
“We are hoping for more voices like this one”, said a prominent member of the PP alluding to the text that Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba uploaded to Facebook last Friday, criticising the tone, the content and the basis of the proposal of a coalition government that the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, launched at the Socialist Pedro Sánchez.
The Spanish political scene has become a giant chessboard and Mariano Rajoy has decided to gain time with the hope that the PSOE Federal Committee of 30 January throws out the pretensions of Sánchez of going to an investiture debate with the backing of Iglesias.
Sources in Moncloa insist that Rajoy has no intention whatsoever of going to the first one without any support and asking Congress to have confidence in him, refuting the acting president himself, who had given to understand that he would do so. But whether or not there is a discussion in respect of the convenience of submitting to a parliamentary debate, all doubts were removed when Iglesias proposed to Sanchez, in a great tactical movement, a coalition government with him as vice-president and the best ministerial portfolios.
At every point, Rajoy’s strategy has been to remain in the background while the PSOE sinks in its contradictions. But he has not been doing everything to no purpose. During this time, it appears he has had several conversations with notable members of the Socialist old guard, such as former President Felipe González, as well as Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and José Bono, all of them resistant to any agreement that leaves the PSOE in the hands of Podemos.
What is more, it cannot be discounted that the desire framed at the beginning of this article by that high ranking PP member becomes reality, and Gonzalez says out loud what he has been saying for weeks in private conversations: the bear hug for the Socialists that is implied by a pact with the very people who want to consign the century old party to the history books.
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Rajoy has held talks with the old socialist guard while Sánchez talks to Rivera and Iglesias
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The second round of talks which the King will initiate on Thursday will not culminate until the following week, that is until after the meeting of the Socialist Federal Committee which is envisaged as being a very complicated one for Sánchez. Not only because it may dictate to him even more conditions and limits on an approach to Podemos but may even force the immediate convocation of a federal congress to strip him of the leadership.
“Perhaps, after this second round, the situation may be different”, sources in Moncloa point out, without ruling out that some Socialist members of parliament “could break the discipline of the vote in order to prevent the investiture of Sanchez, should its reach that stage”. And thinking of its own critical sector, the same sources categorically insist that “if there is a PP candidate for the investiture, it will be Rajoy and, if there is a repetition of the elections –which is the least of the worse case scenarios for Moncloa– the candidate will be Rajoy, there is no doubt about this”. Take note, Esperanza Aguirre.
Meanwhile, Sánchez has responded to the strategic stroke by Rajoy, postponing the negotiations to form a left wing alternative, talks which, until now, he has denied holding with the leader of the brown party. “Hardly forty minutes”, in order to attract Podemos to the Congress Table pact that Iglesias refused to second, admit Socialist sources. And he spoke this Saturday with the President of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera, but, above all, to distance himself from Iglesias.
The intentions that Rajoy should be the first to self-immolate himself before Congress have proved futile for the time being but neither does Sánchez want to negotiate “from a position of blackmail and putting the interests of the party ahead of those of the voters” in allusion to Podemos going for broke, according to a communique by the PSOE this Saturday.
Nothing is written or decided so that new twists to the plot cannot be discarded.
